FRANCE:Hundreds of human rights activists and leftists marched through Paris today to protest against the victory of the French far right in European Parliament elections.

Europe's political establishment is reeling and searching for new direction after far-right and Euroskeptic parties made big gains in Sunday's elections.

The anti-immigration National Front got the largest number of votes in France.

About 1,000 protesters gathered at Bastille Square in Paris, including students and activists from the International League for Human Rights and the New Anti-capitalist party.

They say the National Front – which warns that France risks being subsumed by Muslim immigration – threatens French values of tolerance and social justice.

NORTH KOREA: Kim Jung Un's dictatorship has agreed to open a new investigation into the fate of Japanese citizens it abducted in the 1970s and 1980s.

In return Japan will lift some sanctions after investigators have begun work, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said.

Humanitarian aid to North Korea will depend on the progress of the investigation, which is expected to start in about three weeks.

North Korea acknowledged in 2002 that its agents kidnapped 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly to train spies in Japanese language and culture.

It allowed five of them to return to Japan in 2002, but said the others had died.

Japan remains suspicious of that finding and has identified others it believes were abducted.

BRITAIN: An Islamic charity headed by a white Muslim convert is being investigated over payments to trustees after a Daily Star Sunday investigation.

Last week the Charity Commission announced an inquiry into the Islamic Education and Research Academy (IERA), amid fears the North London-based group, led by Abdur Raheem Green, 48, broke charity rules.

The move comes over a year after we first voiced concerns about the organisation's views on domestic violence - after Green said it is OK for men to beat their wives - and payments to trustees.

Accounts ending last June show the IERA had an income of £817,582, with Green, formerly a Catholic known as Tony Green, paid £25,616 in "speakers fees". Fellow trustee Saqib Sattar received £2,800 for similar duties.

The IERA defended the payments, saying they "represented extraordinary value to the charity's cause".

SOUTH AFRICA: A judge in Johannesburg has ordered the correctional services ministry to decide within 30 days whether to grant parole to the former head of a covert police unit that tortured and killed dozens of people during white rule.

Judge Thokozile Masipa made the ruling on Eugene de Kock, who confessed to murder and other crimes and was sentenced to life in prison.

He has been in jail since 1994, when apartheid ended.

De Kock claims he acted on instructions from leaders who were never punished.

His lawyer, Julian Knight, says the government has violated de Kock's rights by delaying a decision on his parole request.

Judge Masipa is also overseeing the murder trial of athlete Oscar Pistorius, who is being assessed at a psychiatric hospital. The trial resumes June 30.

RUSSIA:This is the moment a biker tried his hand at Russian roulette and lost – yet amazingly survived without a scratch.

The deadly new craze involves bikers taking it in turns to dash at high speed across a busy road without looking to see if any cars coming first in Zhukovsky, a city in Moscow Oblast, 40 kilometers southeast of Moscow.

Adrenaline junkie Aleksey Rouhov, 21, got it badly wrong as he followed a mate onto a busy road.

The motorbike disintegrated as it smashed at high speed by a car and the rider catapulted through the air.

Yet seconds later he was on his feet brushing himself down as if nothing had happened.

“To be honest I probably should have punched him”

Shaken up driver Grigorii Amedov

The driver of the car, Grigorii Amedov, 49, said: "I was sure the guy was dead. I couldn't believe it when he just stood up and looked sheepish.

BRITAIN: A quarter of adults are extremely fat and more girls under 20 are overweight in the UK than anywhere else in western Europe, alarming new research has shown. Of the 22 western European countries studied, only Greece is on a par with the UK as far as girls aged 20 and younger are concerned.

AUSTRALIA: The search for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner has suffered a further setback after Australian officials conceded the aircraft wreckage is not on the seafloor in the area they thought it was.

OUTER SPACE: A veteran Russian cosmonaut and a pair of rookie astronauts from the United States and Germany have blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station.

RUSSIA: National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has claimed he worked undercover for the CIA and said he would like to return to the US.

US Secretary of State John Kerry called him a fugitive and challenged him to "man up and come back to the United States" to face the music for leaking state secrets.

EGYPT:Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the general who toppled Egypt's first freely-elected leader, has swept to victory in a presidential election, provisional results show. He joins a long line of leaders drawn from the military.

UKRAINE: Bodies of some of 50 or so pro-Russian separatists killed in fierce Ukrainian military strikes are being prepared to be taken back to Russia, a top rebel leader says. It is the first admission of direct involvement of Russian fighters in Ukraine eastern rebellion.

THAILAND: Rulers of the military junta hold out little hope for early elections, saying conditions have to be right and divisions healed before there could be a return to civilian rule.

NIGERIA: President Goodluck Jonathan claims he has ordered "a full-scale operation to put an end to the impunity of terrorists on our soil" as he reassures parents of 219 schoolgirls being held by Boko Haram that his forces will free them.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Youths set up barricades on roads in the capital Bangui and lit fires in protest at an attack by Muslim gunmen on a church that left at least 11 people dead.

NORWAY: Police removed seven Greenpeace activists from a Statoil rig in the Norwegian Arctic, the energy firm and the environmentalist group confirmed. The company plans to drill the world's most northerly oil well. (

CYPRUS:The country's first Gay Pride march in Nicosia on Saturday will highlight the lack of legal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens – 16 years after homosexuality was decriminalised.

UNITED STATES: In an unprecedented, three-year cyber spying campaign, Iranian hackers createD false social networking accounts and a fake news website to spy on military and political leaders in the US.

BRITAIN: Afusat Saliu, 31, a Christian mother battling deportation to Nigeria tonight by the UK Border Agency, claims she risks being killed if she is forced to return home.

Ms Saliu fled to the UK in 2011 while she was heavily pregnant after her stepmother threatened to subject her daughter Bassy, now four, to female genital mutilation (FGM).